YARD SALE IN THE SKY - a project of Kristin LucasParticipating artists include: CeciliaDougherty, Eteam, Sue Havens, Joe McKay,Alisdair MacRae, Robert de Saint Phalle andpossibly more...BRING YOUR SINGLES AND YOUR SMARTPHONE T OTHE HIGH LINE TO BROWSE AND PURCHASE 3D VIRTUAL OBJECTS AT A COMMUNITY YARD SALE! LUCAS WILL BE PRESENT TO MANAGE CASH SALES AND TO VIRTUALLY RELOCATE ITEMS TO BUYERS HOMES.

Kristin Lucas’s Yard Sale in the Sky is an art project that borrows from the structure and function of a community yard sale and is located on the High Line – a walking park that hovers above street level in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. It takes place on May 14, from 2-4pm.

While the elevated locale of this art event could be lyrically described as “in the sky,” the sale items, which are virtual and positioned at specific geographic locations, also inform the project’s name. The objects at this yard sale are not from the attic and basement, but are digitally rendered products of three-dimensional modeling programs, repurposed for Augmented Reality (AG).

Using a free phone app called Layars, shoppers can see the virtual yard sale items on their iPhone (3GS and 4), iPads, or Android smartphones when passing through each object’s programmed longitudinal/latitudinal location. Much like a physical yard sale, the visitor discovers each thing as he or she wanders through a physical space, but in this case the chotchkies, furniture, lawn mowers, etc. are virtual and only become visible through the use of our phones.

By placing her yard sale booty at specific sites on The High Line using geolocation and asking us to find and purchase them, Lucas finds a playful way to explore the ways we allow or don’t allow digitally produced and distributed images, information, and objects into our everyday life. Lucas is mapping the physical experience of a bargain hunt onto the virtual, bringing those worlds together throughcommerce and relocation. This merging of the physical and virtual isone of the stated goals of Augmented Reality whose manifestodescribes AG as a new form of art that “shows up in the WrongPlaces. It Takes Stage without permission. It is RelationalConceptual Art that Self-Actualizes.”

Once a bargain hunter finds an object he or she wants – and, according to the artist, the objects are “priced to move!” – the customer purchases it from Lucas who personally oversees the event much like a neighborhood yard sale is monitored by the homeowner. In exchange for cold, hard cash, Lucas agrees to relocate the virtual object to a buyer’s exact location. These objects, like invited phantasms, then take up residence with their new owner. Lucas has included friends and colleagues in the project, making it a multiple party yard sale. Part scavenger hunt, part collaborative enterprise, Lucas’s investigation of traditional commercial exchange using virtual objects is an event that is at once familiar and foreign. It is grounded in a collective experience of the yard sale, but floats in and out of sight via a technological sensory organ, the phone.

This humorous and homespun approach to technology is a reminder that virtual projects and products, both creative and commercial, aregeolocated into our physical spaces. Whether we access them or not,the locations of virtual phenomena are constantly intersecting withthe trajectories of our physical world. Yard Sale in the Sky is a logical extension of Lucas’s practice which sometimes incorporates retooled personas, democratically reconfigured media, and virtual elements, including her Refresh project where the artist refreshed herself via a court-approved rebooting of her identity; and her collaborative barcode cinema public art project where people could use a barcode reader app on their phones to view videos.

Yard Sale in the Sky is Lucas’s offsite contribution to the augmented reality group exhibition Gradually Melt the Sky at Devotion Gallery in Bushwick, which is was on view from April 8 – May 1 this spring.

Barcode Cinema invites you on a tour of the geographic locations of geotagged images in downtown New York this weekend as a part of Conflux Festival on Saturday and Sunday. Each Barcode Cinema site is physically tagged with a unique barcode sticker. With the use of a web-enabled camera phone and a free downloadable application that turns a mobile phone into a barcode scanner, festival goers can interact with barcode stickers at designated sites to access locative media. Image sonifications of geotagged images will playback as movies on mobile phones at locations discovered from our research of the communal landscape constructed by Google, Flicker and Picasa, among others. Participants will hear a sonic interpretation of the surveiled imagery of the space they have accessed.

Things you will need for the tour:[list][*]a web-enabled mobile camera phone[*]a barcode scanner app installed on your mobile phone(there are many free apps available including Neoreader and ScanLife)[*]Barcode Cinema map and checklist[*]a flashlight if you visit sites after nightfall[/list]

Once you locate a Barcode Cinema sticker, all you need to do is scan the barcode and turn up the volume! Geotagged images will be translated into tones and sounds that directly correspond to the frequency each pixel's color occupies in the visible spectrum. As each sound is generated it's corresponding pixel disappears returning the captured image back to the ephemera of experience. Tip: Turn on your mobile phone and test your barcode scanning app with the barcode at the top of the page.